The study presented in this paper is concerned with the analysis of the ultrasound Doppler signal of the arteries in the spectro-temporal domain using the wavelet packet transform. The spectro-temporal representation is obtained by the decomposition of the Doppler signal in frequency sub-band, using filter banks associated with a well chosen wavelet. It is shown that the decomposition level depends on the stationarity of the Doppler signal, and the best profile of blood flow velocity in arteries is obtained according to an appropriate choice of wavelet type.
Three types of wavelets have been tested on two Doppler signals previously recorded from the carotid and femoral arteries. The best representation is obtained when the frequency sub-bands of the filter bank associated with chosen wavelet are regularly distributed in the frequency domain and the level of decomposition is 7.